Outside Voices

It's been brewing for awhile, but last week Outside Voices—along with Design Workshop and Toole Design Group—had the chance to collaborate on an exciting new initiative at BikeHouston! What a great team and great future ahead for this project. Cannot wait to see its next iteration come to light. Joe Cutrufo, Brian Chambers, Jared Draper, Tarana Hafiz ??, Kelsey Walker, AICP, Jie Yang, Evan Peterson, Sanjay Bapat, and many more.

?? Fantastic workshop for the Main Street Promenade! ?? 250 residents, business owners, students, and visitors came out—in the 95 degree heat—to see the new Main Street vision come to life through the schematic design. We posted up at Flying Saucer Draught Emporium, and got to experience the joy and fun of our community enjoying drinks and conversation together on Houston's Main Street. I cannot thank Downtown Houston+ enough for leading such a transformative project with vision, clarity, and heart, and for all the incredible team members collaborating to make this vision a reality. Kris Larson, Cassie Hoeprich, Jacque Gonzalez-Garcia, Brian Chambers, Sarah Smith, PLA, Alex Ramirez PLA, ASLA, Tarana Hafiz ??, Luke Peterson, Heather Guillen, PE, ENV SP, Jesús M. Donato, P.E., Caitlin Dashiell, Joe Meppelink, Aaron Hernandez, Christal Ayala

January may be the longest month of the year, but my team hustled each and every day. I'm *very* proud of the milestones we accomplished this month and the team members—Jacque Gonzalez-Garcia, Brendan Harrison, Jenna Beasley—that made them happen. For my Houston LinkedIn community, we have an RFQ that's live, new research for you, and some fantastic and bold lighting toolkits to implement! - Completed the "Downtown Gateway" concepts (more to come!) thanks to many partners—Buffalo Bayou Partnership, University of Houston-Downtown, Dan Zimmerman, Design Workshop, Leah Chambers, AICP—for our More Space: Main Street 2.0 Basis of Design (images featured) and published them along with our Basis of Design: https://lnkd.in/gHJk2WWg - Published our RFQ for the Design & Engineering phase of our More Space: Main Street 2.0 project, which we also now call ? Main Street Promenade ? https://lnkd.in/gjVamSwW - Published our Q4 2023 Market Report alongside our brand new Downtown Houston Activity Dashboard; key takeaways: we continue to add more housing (and have officially converted office-to-housing), we have a stablizing Class A-rich office sector, small biz continues to open here, people flocked Downtown for the holiday events, and ~60k people walked, biked, and cycled on the bayou trails that run through Downtown (that's more than the population of Galveston! Thanks for the data, Houston Parks Board) https://lnkd.in/gip9GZDa - Completed and published our Downtown Houston Pedestrian Lighting Study, led by Arup; we will launch our Big Art. Bigger Change. murals (https://lnkd.in/geEVijia) illumination program in 2024 + see the Executive Summary for the toolkits and target areas we will fold into our upcoming Placemaking & Connectivity Action Plan (RFP coming soon!) ?? ????https://lnkd.in/gvj2JSRY